“I’m not seeking financial gain from this,” said Ladonna Hollins, the stepmother of convicted killer and rapist Clayton Lockett, who appeared to regain consciousness and struggle in pain in the middle of his execution Tuesday night…

“I want them to admit they did wrong and after that, let’s change this,” said Hollins, who has not retained a lawyer yet. “If we are going to put people to death, let’s do it the right way.”…

The family of Joseph Clark — whose 2006 execution took 86 minutes after the team struggled to find a usable vein — filed a $150,000 suit that was ultimately thrown out by a judge who ruled his suffering was not “intolerable.”

***

“The European Union is opposed to the use of capital punishment in all cases and under any circumstances,” said Ashton, Europe’s top diplomat, “based on the conviction that the death penalty is cruel, inhumane and irreversible, and its abolition is essential to protect human dignity.” France’s Foreign Ministry also issued a denunciation and urged Oklahoma and other U.S. states to impose a moratorium on executions…

When the United Nations General Assembly called for a global death-penalty moratorium in 2012, U.S. delegates joined countries such as China, India, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Syria, and Zimbabwe in opposing the non-binding resolution. It ultimately passed with 110 countries voting in favor and 39 countries against. Only four countries—China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—performed more executions than the U.S. in 2013, according to data gathered by Amnesty International. That year, the U.S. was the only country in the Western Hemisphere that carried out an execution.

Sarah Ludford, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords and a member of the European Parliament, has been pressing European drug companies not to supply executioners in the United States. “As a very sincere friend, I think this is unworthy of the United States of America,” she said. “The response to the E.U. ban on the export of certain drugs for execution should not be to scrape the moral barrel.”

Javier Garvich, making a comment on the Spanish website of El País, wrote that “if this happened in Cuba or North Korea, the United Nations would seek international sanctions.”…

A Twitter message by someone who pretends to be God somehow caught the European mood. From @TheTweetOfGod: “How could Oklahoma botch an execution? If there’s one thing I would expect Americans to know how to do by now, it’s kill somebody.”

***

In the spring of 2010, the American Board of Anesthesiologists decided to revoke the certification of any member who participated in a lethal injection, a move that could prevent an anesthesiologist from working in most hospitals. “We are healers, not executioners,” a group official said at the time. The American Medical Association long has said that participating in executions violates a doctor’s Hippocratic Oath.

Soon came a shortage of a critical drug used in most lethal injections. The sole U.S. company providing sodium thiopental announced in 2011 that it would stop selling the powerful anesthetic, citing objections from Italy, where the drug had been manufactured. State corrections officials sought to import the drug but the European Union banned the export of drugs used in executions, and U.S. officials seized some drugs at the border.

Many states, including Ohio and Oklahoma, switched primarily to another anesthetic drug, pentobarbital, which is used mostly for inducing comas in patients in cases of brain injury and is also used by veterinarians to anesthetize or euthanize animals. After a Danish manufacturer restricted its use in executions, some states sought out the drug from compounding pharmacies, which custom-mix small batches of drugs and whose products until recently have not been regulated by the Food and Drug Administration…

“We have a dozen methods of lethal injection out there now,” Denno said. “[States] are not prepared to do this; they’re not knowledgeable to do this, and they don’t want to fess up to all the problems that are associated with something like this.”

Most drug companies distributing in the US, such as APP, Lundbeck and West-Ward, have imposed strict distribution controls on medicines that could be used by death penalty states to execute their death row inmates. These controls channel sales of the drugs only through a small number of identified distributors, who are legally bound never to pass the products to departments of correction unless for strictly medical use. The controls also prohibit sales of the drugs to third-party outlets such as wholesalers, retailers or compounding pharmacies, who might then re-sell the medicines to prison services in death penalty states…

Maya Foa, a lethal injection expert at the human rights campaign Reprieve, said: “No pharmaceutical company or pharmacist would want to be associated with what happened in Oklahoma on Tuesday, nor any other lethal injection execution. They have long opposed the abuse of their medicines in executions, and many are now taking active steps to prevent it. It’s high time state departments of correction heeded their wishes and stopped violating medicines for the purpose of capital punishment.”

***

Georgia became the first state to outlaw the electric chair in 2001. In 2008, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled the electric chair cruel and unusual punishment. The state later made lethal injection its default method of execution. And in 2008, the United States Supreme Court decided — as they had previously done with the electric chair — that lethal injection did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment…

Only eight states allow electrocution today — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Since it has become more difficult to obtain the drugs used in lethal injection — many manufacturers in Europe refuse to sell them to the United States if they are destined to be used for capital punishment. Some states — like Virginia — have tried to make the electric chair the default form of execution in the state if the necessary chemicals aren’t available.

Rather than consider abolishing the death penalty, the recent botched execution in Oklahoma is likely to inspire a rethinking of methodology, not an outright ban, as has happened previously in history. After it happens, there will still be people vocally opposing it, there will still be people who think it is necessary, and there is certainly going to be more botched executions making people rethink whether we should abolish the death penalty — or find a new way of doing it once more.

***

Lewis makes clear that he only supports the death penalty for the most heinous of crimes, and only for those crimes for which the defendant’s guilt is certain. At first blush, it’s hard to quarrel with that position. The rub is that we’ll always need to draw that line somewhere. How heinous must the crime be? And how certain of guilt must we be? There have been more than a few exonorations in cases in which it seemed unimaginable that the accused people could possibly have been innocent. And yet they were. We now know that prosecutors and police are capable of fabricating and planting evidence. Not that it’s necessarily common, but it happens. That means that even DNA cases aren’t necessarily iron-clad. The science behind the testing may be certain, but the gathering and testing of evidence will always be done by humans and be subject to all the biases, imperfections and temptations to corruption that come with them. Or to put it in terms with which conservatives might better relate: Police, prosecutors and crime lab technicians just as capable as conniving, malevolence and corruption as any other human being. There’s nothing transformative about a government paycheck that ensures altruism, honesty or goodness; the same goes with giving someone a badge or asking him or her to swear an oath.

This was the point of my poll question here earlier this week. If you support the death penalty, you have to recognize that it will be administered by human beings, who are flawed, and then you have to acknowledge the possibility that no system of justice can be perfect. This means that at over time, the probability of executing an innocent person eventually reaches 1. The question, then, isn’t whether you believe an innocent person has ever been executed. The question is how many innocent people you’re comfortable executing…

People who subscribe to different belief systems sometimes have irreconcilable views on public policy issues with a strong moral component. The death penalty is one of those issues. But conservatives are supposed to be skeptical of government. That is a fundamental part of their belief system. And, except perhaps war, there’s no issue for which the consequences of government error or abuse of power are more absolute, irreversible and profound. Even if they support the idea of capital punishment in principle, it ought to be one of the last issues for which conservatives would be willing to abandon that skepticism. Yet it seems to be one of the issues for which their skepticism is most negotiable.

***

I believe in second chances. I believe in reform and rehabilitation. But I also believe in evil.

You really can’t take someone like Clayton Lockett and reform him — or, at least, the odds of doing so are unfathomable. This wasn’t a crime of passion. He didn’t walk into his house, see his wife in bed with another man, fly into a rage, kill him, and then immediately feel remorse. He shot a 19-year-old woman and then watched his friends bury her alive. Try to reform that…

So yes, we ought to make sure we get to the bottom of what went wrong with this lethal injection. But no, we shouldn’t do too much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching along the way. At the end of the day, the death penalty should be safe, legal, rare — and utterly efficient.

***

***

As many as 300 people who were sentenced to death in the United States over a three-decade period were likely innocent, according to a study published in a leading science journal on Monday.

Dozens of defendants sentenced to death in recent years have been exonerated before their sentences could be carried out, but many more were probably falsely convicted, said University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross, the study’s lead author.

“Our research adds the disturbing news that most innocent defendants who have been sentenced to death have not been exonerated,” Gross wrote in the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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I try and wait for a few revs before upgrading…
im doing the odd revs lately..
clearly fleecing you are right…

good news for us is…you can write and I can draw..
the best drawing tool is useless in unskilled hands..
I see young hotshots make machines that don’t work all the time..
wiz-kids on the keys.. just limited design knowledge..
and I would think writing is the same…
(I cant write any better, no matter how many times
windows wants to change a silly program)

agreed…you left off…televise it…
so the punks can see the end of their hood heros..

the press tries to make these monsters look like boy scouts..
the courts then let them shave shower clean up wear a suit…

I say drop em in a racquetball court
and let the families shoot from the gallery above..
large assortment of weapons.. from sling shots to hand gernades..
drop in the perp…let the cameras roll..
televise it every Friday night ..

you will see cowards running around in a cage…getting what they deserve..

going2mars on May 2, 2014 at 2:40 AM

It is frustrating to hear another story of some guy losing his temper over a chess match with his friend and then killing him with a hammer, and only getting 20-30 years for it. Why should taxpayers be burdened with keeping losers like that alive? If they are undeniably guilty of homicide with malicious or reckless intent, they should be done away with ASAP.

You write well when you want to, I’ve seen your posts when you’re passionate about something. I could sit down with you and show you some software and you’d be up and working within a few minutes.

Tom Clancy wrote in great technical detail. As a matter of fact he had to cut something like 100 pages of technical description from “Hunt For Red October” before it was published. It was his ability to ‘see’ what he was writing about that allowed him to do that and his own interest in the details of submarines, in this case.

You have a deep and abiding interest in space and you’ve got some great insights into the workings of some of the vehicles and equipment used for space exploration. You’ve got an edge and an angle to work with right there that a lot of sci-fi writer’s lack.

lol! That’s very kind of you, but you’re in no danger. It’s not my gig. I just play a few tunes. Ask anyone. :)

thatsafactjack on May 2, 2014 at 3:08 AM

A different model. A small annual fee as a subscription, can be canceled at any time, can just be paid once in the manner of a regular license, but if maintained, encompasses all running updates. Also, no “version” tiers. The program, not the program.

I had something stupid to say about feeding on guys being a little gay, and being homophobic and heteronormative, I have to be starving to un-death to begin with and have to use a straw — but I notice my vampire bad-semi-joke card is totally punched out. :)

it wouldn’t be much of a search to fine the first couple hundred..
that gacy clown from Chicago…dahmer…manson…lake and ing..
the boston bomber punk…you could pick em all day and night..
we have read all the names for years..

that one was funny…
they actually made a pacer, pace car once for a
nascar race at Michigan international speed way…way back when..
they brought the car to the track and it wouldn’t do a 100..
the min for a pace car then was 125…
i watched those guys struggle for 3 days to make it faster…laffs

that one was funny…
they actually made a pacer, pace car once for a
nascar race at Michigan international speed way…way back when..
they brought the car to the track and it wouldn’t do a 100..
the min for a pace car then was 125…i watched those guys struggle for 3 days to make it faster…laffs

and then when it did….deathtrap … the front end shook like wildly… they had to change suspension and tires …cut weight..
carb…exhaust…intake…rad…
i was a kid so i just watched the older guys do the work.. gofer..
off the shelf the thing was a slug..

and then when it did….deathtrap … the front end shook like wildly… they had to change suspension and tires …cut weight..
carb…exhaust…intake…rad…
i was a kid so i just watched the older guys do the work.. gofer..
off the shelf the thing was a slug..

If you don’t support treating Sterling like he had said “Death to all blacks!” with intent, you are a racist. Does this help?
non-nonpartisan on May 2, 2014 at 5:09 AM

Yep. Yesterday I found myself in a situation at lunch with people who were elated over the fact that Sterling was banned. Granted, these people aren’t the most intelligent, and they didn’t seem to know much besides “the evil racist guy got banned! yay” but I still felt the urge to say something about how I felt the amount over coverage was over the top and that there seemed to be a racial double standard. But I bit my tongue and said nothing. In business or work situations I’ve found it’s better to express no political opinion at all unless you are absolutely sure the person agrees with you. I just play dumb and nod whenever anyone expresses political opinions. Yes, you can get branded a “racist” for not agreeing. I definitely feel the pressure to “shut up” if I don’t agree… not just at work (where it’s smart to never say anything political, anyway, though Obama worshipers don’t feel the same pressure in many settings to keep their views to themselves at work, but that’s another story) but in social settings as well. In person I absolutely often feel the chilling, silencing pressure to not go against the PC grain.

Yep. Yesterday I found myself in a situation at lunch with people who were elated over the fact that Sterling was banned. Granted, these people aren’t the most intelligent, and they didn’t seem to know much besides “the evil racist guy got banned! yay” but I still felt the urge to say something about how I felt the amount over coverage was over the top and that there seemed to be a racial double standard. But I bit my tongue and said nothing. In business or work situations I’ve found it’s better to express no political opinion at all unless you are absolutely sure the person agrees with you. I just play dumb and nod whenever anyone expresses political opinions. Yes, you can get branded a “racist” for not agreeing. I definitely feel the pressure to “shut up” if I don’t agree… not just at work (where it’s smart to never say anything political, anyway, though Obama worshipers don’t feel the same pressure in many settings to keep their views to themselves at work, but that’s another story) but in social settings as well. In person I absolutely often feel the chilling, silencing pressure to not go against the PC grain.

bluegill on May 2, 2014 at 5:22 AM

I had a conservative female friend who worked in a job where it was assumed she was stupid. Whenever illiberals started going off about Republicans, she played dumb and asked them questions she knew would antagonize them. She would tell me the stories afterwards and we’d have a good laugh. She was so good at it I think she deserved an A+. Maybe try something like that.

Luckily it’s only a small handful of people who have very strong opinions. Most I’ve had to work with seem closer to LIV’s. They are usually nice and smart, but they don’t always seem too interested in or aware of what’s going on nationally. Let’s just say that when these studies come out showing that half the country doesn’t know who the vice president is, I am never the least bit surprised.

Interesting that in Europe we have people agitating that nice little old ladies have the “right to die”, ie the the right to have someone kill them. (I always wonder how that will work, do you have doctors that do and those that don’t? Will they be able to force doctors to kill them?). It is said that in countries where they have euthanasia hospice care no longer exists… but we get our knickers in a twist about a hardened crimminal. For the record I think what happened to this guy is shocking and horrible. Reading the article, I wondered about the strict protocols drug companies have in place to stop their products being used. Will the conversation go “are you planning to use this in a penal situation on a nasty multiple rapist? Yes? Then you may certainly not use my product. Oh, it’s for a little old lady? Fine, fine, go ahead.”

There was British campaigner for the right to have her husband kill her whose husband was a foreigner. I always wondered if his immigration status was in any way dependent on his wife. It seemed to me that that would set up an inseresting dynamic within the couple. If you want to remain in the UK darling, you have to kill me, or conversely, when the woman was at her weakest ( she was profoundly ill), he had the “right” to kill her. It seems to me that people don’t think these things through.

In person I absolutely often feel the chilling, silencing pressure to not go against the PC grain.

bluegill on May 2, 2014 at 5:22 AM

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I like to read through the posts I missed. Someone posted the Hippocratic Oath. Too bad some have forgotten it. It holds up after all this time. The writer was inspired.

For Working Class Artist I think. Edward Hopper is one of my favorites as you can probably tell from my paintings.

So we raise her up every morning, we take her down every night
We don’t let her touch the ground and we fold her up right
On second thought, I do like to brag
‘Cause I’m mighty proud of the Ragged Old Flag.

– “Ragged Old Flag” – Johnny Cash

My take:High Schoolers in Colorado Recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic. Why it Matters.

and nobody asks, how long did the victem suffer?
you know the reason this guy got death row.

OK, you dont want suffering,
Give him a quart of jack daniels to chug, when its gone and he is totally plastered, put a bullet in his head and then he is an organ donor.
no suffering, quick and somebody who needs an organ can live

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I like to read through the posts I missed. Someone posted the Hippocratic Oath. Too bad some have forgotten it. It holds up after all this time. The writer was inspired.

For Working Class Artist I think. Edward Hopper is one of my favorites as you can probably tell from my paintings.

crankyoldlady on May 2, 2014 at 6:57 AM

Good Mornin’

You do good work…I studied a lot of Hopper when I was a printmaker.

Hopper’s work is quite literary in the sense of being….visually poetic…imho

Similar feeling in your work…I wonder if it’s a regional characteristic?

The environment affecting the painter in a particular way?

Anyway It’s strong and quiet stuff….really good work…Thanks for sharing the link.

How about offering the condemned a choice of ways out? Really a court shouldn’t have a say over the deal if it is not a single choice, so make it a variety that the condemned can choose from. Hanging, electrocution, firing squad, lethal injection, gassing and maybe something like being dropped naked into the middle of the Pacific Ocean from 10,000′ sans parachute or put on the polar ice cap in similar condition via similar means, no landing necessary. Any court that tries to whittle any of them out can have a new one to replace it… but my guess is that for instant death the good old firing squad will be the fastest and most humane way to deal with things.

The condemned gets a last meal, so how about having them decide on the last meal ticket, as well?

Hopper’s work is quite literary in the sense of being….visually poetic…imho

Similar feeling in your work…I wonder if it’s a regional characteristic?

The environment affecting the painter in a particular way?

Anyway It’s strong and quiet stuff….really good work…Thanks for sharing the link.

workingclass artist on May 2, 2014 at 7:44 AM

I suppose all painting reflects the feeling of the region. One of the reasons I came out here to Ohio is the light is good like it is in places like Cornwall England, for instance. Pittsburgh was a good place too in it’s own way. The light is different there. There is a painter there whose work I admire, Cynthia Cooley. I wish I could paint like her.

I just love it when the Brits with their long waits for health care that lets people die just from the wait or the Belgians who let children decide if they want to be euthanized, give us their definition of what’s the right way to dispose of someone convicted of a heinous crime. Oh, you left out the part in the retelling of Lockett’s crime where the victim was repeatedly raped before being shot in the head but not killed and then buried alive screaming.
She was an only child who had just graduated from high school. Maybe OK could bring back the gallows or hire a guy with a really big sword.

A medical examination of the convicted’s system prior to execution may have shown the convict’s level of resistance/tolerance to the chemicals used would show that a different chemical or higher dose was necessary.

A medical examination of the convicted’s system prior to execution may have shown the convict’s level of resistance/tolerance to the chemicals used would show that a different chemical or higher dose was necessary.